His name was either a remarkable coincidence or a legacy from a relative who looked just like him. He really did resemble a six-foot tall baby. Pink and round, with milky blue eyes, he only rarely spoke, and when he did it was in small, baby tones.

His job, maintaining a database for a Wall Street brokerage house in bankruptcy, required very little talking. In fact, it required very little work at all, only that the database be working when the firm's indicted executives needed help with their defense briefs.

Frederic passed the long hours alone with the computers by blaring rock music through the empty building, and posting to Internet mailing lists and bulletin boards. He liked to write romantic fantasies about television actresses and put them up for the world to read, or at least that part of the world subscribed to alt.erotic.tvstars.

He had developed a kind of standard plot, which involved combining the actress in question with whatever else he was hungry for at the moment, usually junk food. His most popular one featured the lady from Home Improvement and a great deal of butterscotch frosting.

He sometimes had trouble writing them, because his actual experience with women was so limited he was never quite sure if what he imagined was physiologically possible. There had been a number of objections to his story about Lt. Uhura from Star Trek and a pound cake.